Grammar

I.S. Ibrakhim
Associate professor at the Department of Japan Studies,
Faculty of Asian and African Studies
Grammar

This lesson’s topics:

1 Parts of speech
2 Word order in Japanese
3 Yes/no questions
Content and auxiliary words in Japanese

Content words: nouns, adjectives and adverbs,

verbs, pronouns, numerals, interjections.

Auxiliary words: particles (including case indicators),

postpositions, conjunctions, nominalizers, copular verbs.

Learn this rule! Auxiliary words always

follow content words!
The category of number

Japanese does not have grammaticalised number or gender,

except for some fossilized forms dating back to Old Japanese.

Stem reduplication
KUNI (country) KUNIGUNI (countries)
HITO (person) HITOBITO (people)
Prefix [ SHO ] 
SHO-KOKU (countries)
Tense

There are only two tenses :

past and present/future

Formed with suffixes in the final forms

of the verb or noun predicate.
Grammaticalised register

TWO styles:

• polite colloquial – [ DES ]/[ MAS ]-style

• neutral written – verbs ending in U/RU
Sentence structure and word order

Major rules:
1 The predicate always ends the sentence, whether
it is expressed by a verb, an adjective or a noun.
2 The attribute always precedes the modified word, whether
it is expressed by an adjective, a noun, a verb or a relative clause.
3 The direct object always stands as close as possible
to the predicate.
In most cases when the subject is not mentioned, it means
that the subject is 1st person
How does this work?

 ENGLISH: 
The most active students will go to Japan.

Noun phrase – the most active students

Verb phrase (predicate) – Japan to will go
NP + VP

 JAPANESE: 
The most active students Japan to will go.
Yes/no question

[ КА ] – interrogative particle

Will the most active students go to Japan?

{The most active students} {Japan to} {will go} [ КА ]?
St Petersburg
University